This document analyzes and compares how different newspapers covered major world events like natural disasters and political uprisings on their front pages versus on Twitter. It finds that US papers tended to have more articles and shorter headlines compared to Spanish papers. It also compares the asynchronous and synchronous evolution of news coverage over time between different media sources. Next steps discussed include developing tools for crowdsourced analysis, scraping data directly from newspaper sites, integrating more variables, and combining coverage with other media streams like Twitter.

1. Analyzing newspapers'
front pages vs Twitter
Pablo Rey Mazón
Visiting Scientist, Center for Civic Media. MIT Medialab
More info and all the images at:
Contact: pablo@meipi.com numeroteca.org/cat/frontpage-newspaper/
civic.mit.edu/blog/pablo/analyzing-newspapers-front-pages

2. May 15th, 2011 Madrid

3. May 16th, 2011

4. May 16th, 2011

5. May 17th, 2011

6. May 17th, 2011

7. May 18th, 2011

8. May 18th, 2011

9. May 19th, 2011

10. May 19th, 2011

17. Evolution of news in time
Haiti earthquake. January, 2010

18. Japanese Tsunami. January, 2010

19. Spanish – US Newspapers & Japanese Tsunami

20. Number of articles in the front page of main
Spanish and US newspapers
Spain
El País 7.5
El Mundo 7.5
ABC 4.5
La Vanguardia 5.1
La Razón 4.9
Público 4.6
Average 5.7
USA
WSJ 34.8 (28.0 short-small headlines)
The Washington post 13.1
The New York times 15.5
The Boston Globe 17.7 (9.2 short-small headlines)
USA Today 13.0
Los Ángeles Times 9.7
Average 17.3 (11.1 )

21. Compare simultaneous news evolution in time
Arab Spring: Egipt, Lybia, Syria. January, 2011

22. 15M Movement– DSK detention. Spanish newspapersMay, 2011

23. Compare asynchronous news evolution in time
Haiti Earthquake – Japanese Tsunami.

24. Semantic analysis of news content in front pages

26. Compare with other media
-TV Broadcast transcripts
-Radio transcripts
-Web front pages
-Twitter

28. Next steps
-Tool for crowdsourced analysis: PageOne
-Scraping from original newspaper sites
-Interactive design
-Use more variables: position, number of words,
image, headline size, frame of the news, content.
-Integration with other news streams and analytic tools:
TV broadcast, Media Meter, Twitter